Children vs the wild

They make them tough in South America. 

Forty days after they walked away from a plane crash that took the lives of their mother, an indigenous leader and the pilot, the four Mucutuy children were found alive in the Amazon rainforest.

“My mother is dead,” four-year-old Tien Noriel Ranoque Mucutuy told rescuers who found the kids after a search involving Colombian air force planes and hundreds of people on the ground.

Towards the end of the Amazon search, 100 people were combing the forested slopes of the Cascade mountains in Washington state for 10-year-old Shunghla Mashwani, who became separated from her family while hiking on June 4. 

For what it’s worth, the woods of the Cascades are, in the words of the Frost poem, lonely, dark and deep. And also cold and full of predators, not all of them four-legged.

Mashwani, who arrived in the US with her family from Afghanistan two years ago, was rescued after a chilly night alone. She had made her way downhill to water because that’s what her father told her to do if she ever got lost. 

Her ordeal and that of the Mucutuy children is eerily reminiscent of the story of 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke, who woke up strapped to her airline seat in the Peruvian Amazon on Christmas Day 1971.

Koepcke and her mother were on a Lockheed Electra, operated by a dodgy Peruvian carrier called Lansa, that broke up in a violent thunderstorm.

Koepcke, the only survivor, spent 11 days following streams downhill until she was rescued by fishermen. 

The thing all these kids have in common? Parents who taught them stuff about the wild, and not an iPad or a game of Minecraft in sight.